We read Elena Bennett's comment piece ("Changing the agriculture and environment conversation") with great interest last month and were very pleased to see this important topic being discussed in the very first issue! However, we disagreed with some of the points and suggestions that Prof. Bennett made, and have made some of our own suggestions about how to move the debate forward.

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How to guarantee global food
security whilst reducing the environmental impact of agriculture isone
of the most urgent questions humanity faces. We were very pleased, therefore, that this topic was discussed in the very first issue of Nature Ecol & Evo. However, whilst we agree with Professor
Bennett that the lens of the debate should be widened1, we disagree that it should be framed
exclusively around human well-being and argue that it would be more productive
to build on, rather than abandon, existing analytical frameworks.

Focusing solely on human
well-being prioritises species that provide ecosystem services – usually common
species close to people2. Most species, however, are rare and sensitive
to human disturbance. This is why field studies of several thousand species –
from birds in Kazakh steppe, Latin American grasslands, and equatorial African
forests, to South American dung beetles and trees across three continents3,4 – show that land-sparing approaches that
promote the protection or restoration of natural habitats would, if
implemented, benefit a range of taxa in a wide variety of landscapes. Despite
concerns surrounding the generalisability of these case-studies, the results are
remarkably consistent. Focusing only on human well-being risks abandoning these
species in the face of ever-increasing threats.

Managing multifunctional
landscapes requires difficult decisions about the trade-offs and prioritization
of services. In some cases, multiple services will benefit from the same land
use. However, in many cases what benefits one metric will negatively impact
another. Attempting to maximise any aspect of biodiversity, human well-being or
food production without considering consequences for the others will therefore
lead to sub-optimal solutions. Instead, we need quantitative frameworks that
allow us to weigh-up the pros and cons of different land-use decisions for
multiple landscape functions5. The land-sparing/sharing framework explicitly
does this, and has already been extended beyond biodiversity and food
production to address forestry and urban planning6,7, ecosystem services3,7–9, lifestyle interventions such as dietary
change and food waste reductions8, and mixed (rather than binary)
land-use scenarios10.

We believe that quantitative
frameworks such as the land-sparing/sharing framework have greatly expanded our
understanding of how to balance human and environmental needs. In some cases
the interests of both will align, but, as many studies have demonstrated, there
are also unavoidable trade-offs. If we want wildlife to persist alongside food
production, flood protection, climate mitigation, and other services, we should
use all tools at our disposal to evaluate these trade-offs, rather than hope
that a focus on human well-being will benefit all life on earth.

We'd welcome comments on our thoughts, as well as on Prof. Bennett's original piece and, if you're interested in this kind of thing, there is also a discussion on the Food Climate Research Network.

1 Comments

Knowing who we are might be helpful! David Williams is at the Bren School in the University of California, Santa Barbara; Tom Finch is at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge; Erasmus zu Ermgassen is in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge.

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